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But speakers are now scattered across the globe, with pockets even found in US cities such as Chicago where several thousands Assyrians live.

Prof Khan told Smithsonian.com that he felt his 'calling' to record the language after speaking to a
Jew from Erbil, a northern Iraqi city.

'It completely blew my mind,' he said. 'To discover a living
language through the lips of a living person, it was just incredibly
exhilarating.'

Language: A first century AD burial box (ossuary) with an Aramaic inscription that reads 'James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.' The box dates to 63 AD the period in which Jesus lived

Ancient: The language is related to both Hebrew and Arabic. Pictured is a bilingual inscription (in Aramaic and Greek) from Kandahar, in Afghanistan

Ancient: A Christian pilgrim prays as a wooden cross is carried towards the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where Aramaic was once widely used

Aramaic is not alone as an endangered language. Around Fifty to 90 percent of the roughly 7,000 languages currently spoken worldwide are expected to die out by the end of the century, reports Smithsonian.com.

There are a wide variety of different Aramaic dialects spoken worldwide - with the language still used by certain Eastern Christian churches, in the form of Syriac.

Work: Professor Geoffrey Khan is creating a database of the recordings he has made with speakers of Aramaic

Modern Aramaic is now spoken by many small, and often isolated communities of different Christian, Jewish, and Mandean ethnic groups of West Asia.

The most numerous of these are the Assyrians many of who speak Assyrian Neo-Aramaic and Chaldean Neo-Aramaic.

Its first speakers, the Arameans, were
desert nomads, and the language has also been used by groups as diverse
as Christians, Jews, Mandeans, Manicheans, Muslims, Samaritans,
Zoroastrians and pagans.

The language lost its standing in the
Middle East in the 7th Century AD when Muslim Muslim armies from Arabia
conquered the area, establishing Arabic as the key tongue. Aramaic
survived in remote areas such as the Kurdish areas of Turkey, Iraq, Iran
and Syria.

Estimates
of the current number of Aramaic speakers is thought to be around
half-a-million, although the modern version of the language Neo-Aramaic,
has dozens of different dialects - some of which have already died out,
Smithsonian.com reports.

Prof
Khan has published highly regarded works on previously undocumented
Aramaic dialects and is working on a web-based database of text and
audio recordings of the language.

He has travelled as far afield as the former Soviet republic of Georgia in search of its different dialects.

Ancient: Aramaic is related to Hebrew and Arabic. Here, a Rabbi studies part of the Dead Sea Scrolls which were part written in Aramaic